This IDC study considers emerging container technology and the competitive and cooperative relationship that container technology has with the well-established virtualization technology, which ushered in the previous generation of datacenter optimization."Containers are a new form of virtualization that is drawing tremendous interest in the industry as applications shift toward cloud models and are often seen as a direct replacement for hypervisor-based virtualization," says Gary Chen, research manager, Software-Defined Compute. "However, the reality is that containers and VMs work at different layers of the stack and don't necessarily compete. Whether containers will threaten VMs or work with VMs in the long-term future is a deceptively complex interplay of multiple market factors and emerging new technology developments that will have huge impacts on which direction the market ultimately shifts."

IDC Opinion

In This Study

Situation Overview

VMs on a Hypervisor

Pros

Cons

Containers on Bare Metal

Pros

Cons

Multiple Containers per VM

Pros

Cons

One Container per VM

Pros

Cons

Nested Containers

Pros

Cons

Unikernel VMs

Pros

Cons

Future Outlook

Essential Guidance

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Related Research

Synopsis

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